Thirty-Third Sunday: With Empty Hands

In the liturgical year, November is a time of dying: the end of the Church year, which rebegins in Advent, as we prepare for the new birth of Christmas; the death we experience in the natural world as the cold sets in; and the end of our in-order reading of the year’s Gospel, as it approaches Jesus’s death, and Jesus talks about the end times.

In this
Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus responds to people’s admiration of the “costly stones
and votive offerings” at the Temple by saying, “there will not be left a stone
upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” All things end, now fades all earthly
splendor.

Our first
reading, from the prophet Malachi, is nicely paired: “Lo, the day is coming,
blazing like an oven.” The “blazing
oven,” in Hebrew, is more literally a “gleaming flame.” So when the reading goes on to say that just
as those who fear God will experience “the sun of justice with its healing
rays,” we realize that the same fire—the fire of death and the fire of God—is
destruction for some, and healing for others, depending how we relate to God.

***

In this
week’s Gospel, after he tells them that the costly stones of the Temple will be
thrown down, they ask Jesus about the end of time. His answer isn’t nice.

Terrifying
things will come—and false Christ’s will claim to save us. But neither of those things are the end. He doesn’t say, “when something scary
happens, that must be the end.” He says,
“Lots of scary things will happen—long before you even get to the end.”

“Nation
will rise against nation,” “earthquakes, famines, and plagues”: these aren’t
the things of the end, these are situation normal. It’s a real danger of our rich American
society that we imagine that we can escape from bad things. Of course we do our best—but the world is a
scary place. And that’s not even the
end.

***

But even
worse than the temptation of false Christ’s (and false predictions of the end),
and even worse than the external threats (earthquakes, famines and plagues),
the worst suffering will be on account of our faith. How’s that for a Savior? This one says, “If you follow me, you will
get hurt.”

“They will
seize and persecute you . . . because of my name.” Following Jesus is not supposed to make life
easy. He says it will make life
hard.

Then he explains
how to respond: “You are not to prepare your defense beforehand.” It’s tempting to think the threat of
persecution means we need to defend ourselves.
Jesus sends us in barehanded—just as he went to his own death.

Part of
our defenselessness is that Jesus promises that even our families and friends
will turn again us, “and they will put some of you to death.” There is no one we can trust.

Or rather,
we go not empty-handed, but armed by him alone, trusting in him alone: “I
myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking.”
Our strength will not prevail. We
need to renounce our strength. But his
strength is sufficient: “a wisdom . . . that all your adversaries will be
powerless to resist or refute.”

It’s worth
noting that death itself will be like this: we will stand alone and
defenseless. The only one who can save
us is the one who conquered death on the Cross.

***

Real
Christianity is scary; it involves a kind of hopelessness. “I do not promise to make you happy on
earth,” Mary told Bernadette—and Jesus tells us over and over in the
Gospel. If you’re looking for a God who
will make things easy and nice, the Gospel is the wrong place to look.

And yet
there is hope beyond the hopelessness, blessed joy in our sorrows and
sufferings, Resurrection on the other side of the Cross. If we call to Jesus, he will sustain us.

***

Our second
reading adds a funny little angle. The
Lectionary is perhaps less successful than usual in its deployment of Second
Thessalonians. It’s hard to capture the
genius of this little letter.

This reading doesn’t give us the central topic of the letter, I suppose because that topic is summarized in the other readings: “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him,” it says, and like our other two readings, it predicts the calamities we have to look forward to.

But then
it makes a funny turn, and this is what the Lectionary gives us: “In toil and
drudgery, night and day we worked, so as not to burden any of you.” “We instruct and urge in the Lord Jesus
Christ to work quietly and to eat their own food.”

The genius
of Second Thessalonians is to say our response to all these dire predictions is
not to stockpile water and weapons, not to gossip about when or how we think
the end will come—but to put our head down and trudge along.

As Jesus says at the end of our Gospel: “By your perseverence you will secure your lives.” The real excitement is to abandon ourselves to him.